'Every crisis is also a moment of reconstruction' Stuart Hall
<h3>Introduction</h3>
The United Nations SDGs and climate agreements have been a top-down attempt at tackling the climate emergency. Global agreements and pacts, however, remain ideals that not all people necessarily prioritise, understand, or agree to as there is a deep disconnect between global collective visions, political agendas at a state level, and the ordinary everyday priorities of citizens. In some contexts, communities have launched the climate agenda locally and nationally and in others, they have pushed back. The global energy shortage makes this divergence and disconnect even more stark but has also driven community-lead innovation to overcome energy shortages; for example, the installation of solar panels in places like Lebanon.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Global energy experts sitting in exclusive roundtables alongside policy makers designing top-down futures in the glitzy conference facilities of five-star hotels as a model of future-making is exclusionary, limited, and deprives the public from discovering pathways for integrated real-life solutions. This paper proposes and describes methods in which collective visions can be formed based on inclusive imaginaries of energy justice and urge those at COP27 to think about energy democracy and energy justice.
<h3>Introduction</h3>
In the midst of a global energy crisis, how do we think of energy systems as a set of relations, rather than a physical system of wires and panels? &nbsp;How do we think of the production of energy as a political decision and not&nbsp; one simply determined by an invisible commodities market that sells future securities?&nbsp;
Whereas power cuts and energy price hikes have been the daily norm for millions of people around the world before the current energy shortages, these were problems that were generally considered &ldquo;developing world problems.&rdquo; These issues were attributed to a lack of investment, a lack of planning, and/or corruption. Many rely on expensive diesel generators, or simply live in energy poverty resorting to burning wood or charcoal to cook and heat. In response, the renewable energy transition promised to &ldquo;leapfrog&rdquo; these countries into &ldquo;solving&rdquo; both the supply-price problem of energy, whilst also saving us from future impacts of climate change. This techno-utopian, &ldquo;solutionist&rdquo; approach also often&nbsp; compartmentalised sectors like water, food, waste and energy separately without thinking of them as&nbsp; integrated&nbsp; in order to propose systems that would be circular such as waste-to-energy. As the transition falters and demonstrates its political limits, developed countries have ceased to inspire confidence in meeting their climate change commitments as they increasingly turn to meeting short term energy needs from gas. In turn, states in the Global South, who are the most vulnerable to climate change impacts, may reduce infrastructure investment in renewables as finance costs increase as a response to inflationary pressures. Whilst people at the community level seek solutions of their own, as the paper will explore, the capacity to regulate the market to deliver the quality and safety standards, and trust in renewables will be an issue.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;
<h3>Energy Transition at the Local Level</h3>
As the energy crisis creates a dire cost-of-living emergency, what happens when people are forced to take (greater) responsibility for providing their own energy? How do people self-govern access to shared energy sources and ensure everyone gets a fair share? &nbsp;One approach is to develop local energy &ldquo;micro-grids&rdquo; as a community collective or by private companies procured by cooperative groups. Here, the infrastructure of energy is neither public, nor private, but something in between: communal.&nbsp;
In Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, people have been resorting to communal solutions in response to a weak public grid for a long time by relying on expensive private diesel generators at the level of individual households or building units. The monthly electricity costs for those relying on generators, now equals&nbsp;or exceeds&nbsp;the average monthly salary of many people in Lebanon or Iraq. This has spurned a very recent &ldquo;scramble&rdquo; for solar power (Connor-Raed, 2022). Individual households, residents of apartment buildings, and large organisations are installing solar photovoltaic (PV) panels with storage batteries to make use of the price differential between solar and the increasing price of diesel (roughly USD0.06 per kilowatt hour [kw/h] for solar compared to some USD0.44 per kw/h when generated by private diesel generators) (Kanso, 2022). Power rationing and solar PVs require electrical storage to secure continuous, reliable power. This is especially critical during the peak season when temperature increases trigger higher power rationing. In places like Lebanon, even supermarkets have begun to sell Solar PVs as demand increases (AFP, 2022)
<h3>Challenges to Communal Energy Solutions</h3>
This sudden demand and changes in consumer preferences means that a bottom-up locally driven energy transition needs to be carefully understood. Similar to the transformation that began to take place in some European countries over a decade earlier, these countries will face regulatory challenges. When citizen collectives (sometimes called &ldquo;Community Solar&rdquo;) produce energy together, the management of energy production/micro-grids lies with ordinary citizens. This shifts power from the state to the citizen whilst requiring the state to ensure citizen rights are protected.&nbsp;
The first challenge citizen collectives run into is the legal and institutional limits of established energy systems. Disruptive technologies require a level of awareness, technical knowledge, and political will to accommodate the increase of new technologies in equitable ways. Governments are yet to establish rules for the market in terms of incentives, punishments, or checks and balances to guide emerging energy systems. Net metering and the ability, or lack thereof, to feed energy into the grid present some legal obstacles. For example, in the Lebanese constitution, municipalities are prevented from producing electricity that is the sole prerogative of the national utility provider which prevents a state owned but decentralised generation model (Ahmed, 2020).
The second challenge is that of the social infrastructure required for self-governing micro-grids and the institutional rules for cooperation and coordination within the community. By design, microgrids need local management in one form or another. In theory, one could try to fully automate the necessary balancing act of supply and demand through &ldquo;smart&rdquo; energy buffers that can control the supply of energy. Decentralized renewable electricity generation and management is a disruptive&nbsp;feature of renewable energy and can occur in both urban and rural contexts at different levels: national, regional/municipal, neighbourhood, street, building, or individual. This requires a contextual assessment to see what works well within existing communal/cooperative groups in each country to ensure that any reforms encourage, rather than impede, how communities work together.&nbsp;
The third challenge is consumer protection, particularly in terms of safety, cost and quality. As Jessica Obeid, a Lebanese energy expert put it in a tweet: &ldquo;the solar industry &lsquo;boom&rsquo; in Lebanon is the result of institutional &amp; policy failures. The only consequence of institutional &amp; policy failure is chaos. Most consumers will end up paying $$$$$$ [a lot of money] on operation &amp; maintenance costs &amp; hazards &amp; waste will be fun (Obeid, 2022).&rdquo; The absence of government oversight over renewable energy products in a free market can lead to a consumer &ldquo;racket&rdquo; whereby commercial suppliers charge higher prices and supply poor quality products, improper hardware or improper installation. As seen through recent incidents of fires starting on rooftops caused by solar PV panels heating up and battery explosions in Beirut will be more common. In addition to the potential physical danger that poor technology can cause, if not addressed by the state, public trust in energy transition will erode over time. &nbsp; &nbsp;
Finally, the problem of waste disposal management of renewable hardware (the SPVs and turbines) in a safe and sustainable way.&nbsp; Lebanon&rsquo;s waste management crisis was already a major problem, with 29% of waste disposed of informally and with no recycling programs (Kanso, 2022). Electronic waste requires landfill sites with extra safeguards against &lsquo;leaching&rsquo; to avoid soil and groundwater contamination. Low quality panels and the wrong type of batteries lead to an increase in waste volume, making recycling programs all the more necessary. Waste-to-energy is highly underutilised as a source of energy that can effectively manage waste and contribute to building a renewable economy.&nbsp;
<h3>Recommendations for Just Energy Futures</h3>
Energy transition is a noun that does not offer a generalizable framework. In fragile contexts, where energy shortages are much more severe, the transition to non-renewable energy sources will not &nbsp;offer a comprehensive solution.&nbsp;
The transition is fraught and requires context-specific policy ideas for new approaches and forms of political engagement, governance and regulatory oversight. This institutional change should address existing social, economic, and political inequalities that already affect access, affordability, and the sustainability of energy. Structural problems and questions of justice should drive the positive outcomes of the transition and not be further ignored.&nbsp;
To encourage citizen-led change and innovation in times of scarcity and severe energy provisioning, the following will be critical:
Allowing bottom-up creative and collective change based on a democratic approach that considers rights, ownership, dialogue, and deliberation. Despite their cruciality in this context, decentralisation, self-governance and the law has barely been addressed.&nbsp;
Regarding&nbsp; questions of energy justice, a recent paper (Shehabi &amp; Al-Masri, 2022) sets out a design for a citizen assembly and stresses the necessity of assessing the inevitable trade-offs of energy transition. These relate to issues around the use of agricultural land, nationalisation versus privatisation of energy production, price and provisioning of energy supply, and centralisation versus decentralisation of the energy system (Shehabi and Al-Masri, 2022). Addressing these questions in a citizen assembly will allow for the creation of a common vision that reconciles and settles the contested priorities of the different stakeholders. In light of this, the co-production of energy visions needs to be thought of in more meaningful and practical ways to be able to resolve such issues democratically, while reducing potential harm to stakeholders. Communities are already rallying around the problem of energy shortages and they should be enfranchised in the decision-making process.&nbsp;
Larger-scale renewable energy projects need to do justice to standards of fairness in all dimensions. For example, in terms of outcome, provision should be fairly distributed, while procedurally, decisions impacting communities should be participatory. Finally, reparations for any harm should be offered. For instance, in Scotland, energy companies are required to pay into Community Benefits Funds as compensation to communities affected by onshore wind turbines (Kerr et al, 2017).
Energy transition needs to be an integrated transition. Waste, food and water sustainability need to be considered together, rather than creating further unintended environmental damage downstream. A circular approach is how the natural world works and how our new sustainability approaches should be designed.&nbsp;
States need to take measures to protect consumer-citizens from the profit-seeking practices that exploit the current energy crisis. They must provide market oversight of prices, product quality, and safety standards, and at times be interventionist in redistributing profits through windfall taxes as&nbsp; targeted support for the poorest. Ironically, renewable energy companies may make the most profits when energy is sold at market rates, rather than cost.&nbsp;
Communal renewable energy is a promising endeavour, especially in the global climate and current concern with energy transition and sustainable solutions. States must be ready to expand their own capacities in order to implement integrated solutions that are regulated, communal, and sustainable.&nbsp;
<hr>
Resources
Ahmed, Ali (2020) Distributed Power Generation for Lebanon - Market Assessment and Policy Pathways <a href="https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/353531589865018948/pdf/Distributed-Power-Generation-for-Lebanon-Market-Assessment-and-Policy-Pathways.pdf">https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/353531589865018948/pdf/Distributed-Power-Generation-for-Lebanon-Market-Assessment-and-Policy-Pathways.pdf</a>
AFP. (2022, September). &lsquo;A necessity&rsquo;: Lebanon&rsquo;s forced conversion to solar. Fin24.<a href="https://www.news24.com/fin24/climate_future/energy/a-necessity-lebanons-forced-conversion-to-solar-20220911"> https://www.news24.com/fin24/climate_future/energy/a-necessity-lebanons-forced-conversion-to-solar-20220911</a>
Connor-Raed, K. (2022, 19). The Scramble for Solar: Safety and Environmental Concerns Loom over Renewable Energy. Triangle, Badil The Alternative. <a href="https://www.thinktriangle.net/scramble-for-solar/">https://www.thinktriangle.net/scramble-for-solar/</a>
Obeid, J [@Jessica_Obeid]. (2022). Tweets [(Foregrounding Citizen Imaginaries: Exploring Just Energy Futures through a Citizens&rsquo; Assembly in Lebanon - ScienceDirect, n.d.)] Retrieved August 2022, from <a href="https://twitter.com/Jessica_Obeid/status/1560565108803518464?s=20&amp;t=gSV-eroylCbXeKUOgoWYIw">https://twitter.com/Jessica_Obeid/status/1560565108803518464?s=20&amp;t=gSV-eroylCbXeKUOgoWYIw&nbsp;</a>
Shehabi, A., &amp; Al-Masri, M. (2022). Foregrounding citizen imaginaries: Exploring just energy futures through a citizens&rsquo; assembly in Lebanon. Futures, 140, 102956. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2022.102956">https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2022.102956</a>

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